Thursday, September 02, 2010

Republican bean counter and statistician Michele Bachmann eyeballed the assembled at Beckmania, and cried that there were 1.6 million sycophants who laid siege to the Lincoln Memorial to hang on the Word of Beck. Let’s compare that with other famous invasions in history.

On D-Day, the Allies landed around 156,000 troops in Normandy. The American forces landed numbered 73,000: 23,250 on Utah Beach, 34,250 on Omaha Beach, and 15,500 airborne troops. In the British and Canadian sector, 83,115 troops were landed (61,715 of them British): 24,970 on Gold Beach, 21,400 on Juno Beach, 28,845 on Sword Beach, and 7900 airborne troops.

In July of 1863, General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia of 75,000 men and the 97,000 man Union Army of the Potomac, under George G. Meade, concentrated together at Gettysburg and fought the Battle of Gettysburg.

The French army consisted around 69,000 soldiers with 250 guns, 7,000 artilleries, 14,000 cavalries, and 48,000 infantries. To fill in the ranks of the French army throughout the rule, Napoleon had used conscription but he did not conscript men for the campaign in 1815. All of the troops in the French army were veterans and had been already involved in one or more campaign already. The cavalries of the French army were both formidable and numerous. It also include 7 highly versatile lancers and 14 regiments of heavy and armored cavalry. Meanwhile the armies under the Coalition only had armored troops and Wellington only had a handful of lancers.

Wellington admitted that he had inexperienced, ill-equipped, very weak, and infamous staffs in his army. His troops only consisted of 67,000 soldiers with 150 guns, 6,000 artilleries, 11,000 cavalries, and 50,000 infantries. 24,000 of the soldiers in the troop were British and another 6,000 were from the King’s German Legion. All of the British soldiers in the troops were regular soldiers wherein 7,000 of there where veterans of the Peninsular War. In addition to Wellington’s army there were 3,000 soldiers from Nassau, 6,000 from Brunswick, 11,000 from Hanover and 17,000 Dutch troops.

According to Bachmann, Beck marshaled ten times the Allied landing forces on D Day, about sixteen times the men that the Union Army had in the field for the battle of Gettysburg, and over twenty times the men fielded by Napoleon at Waterloo.